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An anonymous reader writes "A day after Apple filed a motion to intervene in Lodsys's lawsuit against seven app developers (EFF comments), Lodsys has filed its third lawsuit this year. The latest complaint targets ten companies including Adidas, Best Buy, Best Western, Black and Decker. Lodsys sues them over two patents, one of which it also asserts against app developers in court as well as its now famous letters (an example of which has meanwhile been published as a result of Apple's intervention). The ten new assertions relate to web surveys, feedback-soliciting FAQs, and live interactive chat."

Gah, I am so sick of watching this unfold. I keep thinking, well, at least this will highlight the absurdity of it all. But no, it never does, either the case gets dismissed or the idiots actually win [slashdot.org], whether through settlement or actual trial victories.

Please not i4i case in same basket, because it is more complex than that. Microsoft literally stole their tech while working togheter. Yes, software patents are bad, but there are those who tries to use system honesly and those who game the system in the open (patent trolls, offensive pattenting from Amazon, Microsoft).

If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.

Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.

The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick [typepad.com].

If intellectual property rights are so important, how did we survive without them.

Good question. Fortunately, we can look back at history. Prior to intellectual property rights, life expectancy was about 35 years. If you made it through childhood, you could expect to live to 45. So, we didn't really survive terribly well.

The industrial revolution, on the other hand, resulted in life expectancies in the 70s and rising. The graph resembles a hockey stick [typepad.com].

Not quite true. People normally have quite long lives if there is adequate clean water and the facilities to dispose of waste properly (this translate to good hygiene), of course a good medical service does go a long way in extending life but the first two are more important. Actually the industrial revolution lowered the average human life expectancy because of pandemics, excessive pollution and unsafe drinking water, but there were profits to make and who cares about the unwashed masses when you live comf

Not quite true. People normally have quite long lives if there is adequate clean water and the facilities to dispose of waste properly (this translate to good hygiene), of course a good medical service does go a long way in extending life but the first two are more important.

And they didn't, prior to the industrial revolution. See my linked chart.

Actually the industrial revolution lowered the average human life expectancy because of pandemics, excessive pollution and unsafe drinking water, but there were profits to make and who cares about the unwashed masses when you live comfortably.

[Citation needed]. Your assertion is directly opposite to the chart I linked, so I'm sure you've got some data...?

Actually the graph does not quite tell the whole truth since if you have say 100 people on the planet living to say 5000 years and the rest of the population only living to say 25 years (the graph) then the average age is still 25 years. Ok that was extreme but say you have a civilization that that has clean water and good sanitation and the average life expectancy was say 80 years but the rest of the known world had a life expectancy of say 25 years then the overall live expectancy of the world would still be about 25 years.

And where's this mythical civilization with 80 year life expectancy in the 1500s? Do you have data, or are you just going to wave your hands and say "western civilizations"?

It would be convenient if you were right, but you've confused correlation with causation. There were a great number of inventions and innovations over the past 400 years that were not in any realm involving intellectual property or we placed in the public domain by their invetors: sanitary sewers, the corporation, scientific method, the modern democratic republic, rotation of crops, pasteurization, immunizations (Salk asked, "Would you patent the sun?" when asked about patenting his Polio vaccine), and peni

They're not. All studies have shown that they stifle innovation to the tune of setting us back 20 years or so.Take touch screens, for example. Innovation in them didn't even start until the initial patents expired. This isn't uncommon.

This whole thing though, is stinks of SCO style tactics... in my opinion.

I'm glad to see some countries denying the US patent laws although I worry about where it will lead.. we need to face the fact, though, that every minute patent troll are allowed to keep this up, they are damaging smaller companies, stifling innovation and stomping on the true spirit of capitalism.

I have a friend who constantly comes up with great ideas, but he can't develop them because he can't afford to pay off the patent trolls, who do nothing with their patents... it's disgusting.

It's great to say "Kill all the lawyers" - until you need one. There's a surprising number of people and companies willing to simply not pay you. Even if you have a contract, and completed the services rendered. My corporation has had to do it 3 times, and has won 100% of the owed money plus legal fees each time. Would we have won if I had self-represented? It's hard to say.

When the USDA Grade A Bullshit like this gets this thick, I shamefully find myself wishing someone with the means and with the same morals that the execs and lawyers of these corporations who instigate these lawsuits have would engage in some selective assassinations on said execs and lawyers.

Says something about the state of the US today, that someone's "vain hope" is that a large company will spend lots of money to change the law the way that company wants it to be, just because that might coincide with that person's interests.

The reason why we don't have substantive patent reform is because of pharmaceutical companies. The big tech companies, with some exceptions, want weaker patent laws because they're under constant attack by trolls and competitors. Big-pharma on the other hand makes all of its money from patents and will fight tooth and nail against any weakening. As long as big-pharma is dependent on the patent system, I would not expect much change.

These same pharma companies then gouge the tax payers and bankrupt the country by charging $120 for $10 aspirin equivilents. Ironic these same senators blame Obama sayinh we didn't create this problem when letting these drug companies gouge and write the health insurance bill that forces people to pay agaisnt their will.

The patent statutes have been changed relatively little since 1952. There have been updates since then to accommodate a few treaties that the US has since ratified, but those updates didn't really affect patent validity and infringement. In fact, the biggest change in that regard was the gradual elimination of submarine patents by changing the patent term from 17 years after issuance to 20 years after effective filing date. In other words, payments to congresspeople would have had little effect on Lodsys

They're just...vague ideas. I'll admit I'm new to reading patents, but I guess I was under the impression you needed an actual implementation of something to get a patent. Why not just dream everything you could ever think of, and lie in wait for someone to actually do it, then pounce?

I feel like there should be a statute of limitations on this crap. Obviously this guy made no/little efforts prior to this to enforce his "intellectual" property. It's like waiting until they feel like cashing out that they start these kind of lawsuits.

I'll just make that my homepage to put load on their servers instead of ecosia and never ever using ecosia anymore;-)

Seriously, there is probably some merit to the patents in some of the claims, but the practice of filing a broad claim 1 that basically describes not an implementation, but a wish list, makes me throw up.

I wonder when they consider their earliest creation, because my team most likely has prior art.

I managed a small programming office at Indiana University where we had been using computer based testing since the early 80s. Unfortunately, it meant having to send discs via campus mail or driving across several regional campuses and...I'm lazy. About the time gopher was still popular (preweb) I was writing software to do gopher based tests / surveys without a lot of luck because the medium wasn't great for it...which led to client server apps that worked, but weren't as plastic as I'd like...the web was barely being shown and I readapted my code (err...along with my nerds) to do 'cgi' work (sadly it was an entire web server we wrote that had HyperCard on the backend for storage of tests and surveys).

We demonstrated this at a time few people knew what the web was, and at the time it was generally considered the first test / survey software for the web. Again, mostly because I was lazy. Pretty sure we beat all prior art for this.

No no no, you misunderstand the game.You patent everything you can think of in the absolute, most general terms possible. Then you wait for someone to actually do it, then you wait some more for it to become popular, then you come along and blow them all out of the water. (But do it too early and you ain't got nutin' to show for all of your hard work.)

You actually created something though?!!? How the hell did you do THAT?

At the time, I refused to patent anything...the university technology transfer team use to come to me regularly to ask about licensing the apps, and I pretty much said they were public domain except the content...anyone could take the code and do whatever they wanted, except copyright it and claim it was there's (none of this GPL bullshit...if something is free, it isnt free if you have to make demands on it)...a lot was developed on my own time, and I made certain things that were my own time were not deve

Did you not read my post? I specifically said I did quite a few conferences where we showed this off. Beyond that, I actually gave code away to anyone that asked. I taught people how to do this...it was something I found to be pretty simple...other than the TCPIP stack and interfacing to the hypercard (it communicated via AppleEvents and it was a new thing to me trying to learn how to do this under C++) it was actually a dead simple idea.